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Slidell had refused to work with De Leon after he learned that the propaganda agent had opened and read Confederate dispatches intended for him alone. Convinced that De Leon was after his position, Slidell tried to undermine him at every opportunity. He was equally hostile toward Rose Greenhow and discouraged his wife from helping her find a school for her daughter. (Eventually Rose accomplished the task on her own, placing little Rose in the Convent du Sacré Coeur, a Catholic boarding school with many foreigners among its two hundred girls.)17 Slidell’s suspicions about De Leon were groundless, but he was right to be fearful of interference from Rose: “I have come to the conclusion that we have nothing to hope from this side of the Channel,” she wrote to President Davis on January 2, 1864.18 The French mission was a waste of time and resources, she concluded: Slidell cared more about his social life than Confederate diplomacy, and Mason’s grasp of French was too poor for him to be effective in Europe. She advised Davis to recall Slidell and send Mason back to London before the work of two years withered on the vine.

Rose thought Louis-Napoleon’s sympathy was entirely mercenary: “They want tobacco now quite as much as the English want cotton … and I believe that if we were to stop the going out of either cotton or tobacco, it would have more effect than anything else.”19 Having failed to reach the emperor through friends or contacts, she audaciously wrote to him on January 11 requesting a meeting, and much to Slidell’s annoyance, she was granted an interview at the Tuileries on the twenty-second. The little drama was observed by the Maryland journalist W. W. Glenn, who, having spirited Lawley, Vizetelly, and a host of other British visitors across Southern lines, was now in Paris visiting a friend. Glenn’s own feelings about Rose were ambivalent—he had seen her once before in Mason’s company and thought her “a handsome woman, rouged and elaborately gotten up”—but he was still amused by Slidell’s consternation over her success with the emperor:

Slidell, the moment he heard she was to have an audience, was so afraid of the apparent influence of the woman … that she might injure him at Richmond by her letters, or on her return home, and thus perhaps effect his recall which he by no means desired, that he immediately went and left his card; and although he had declared she should not set … foot in his house or know his family, he sent Mrs. S. to call upon her too. When she went to have her interview, Mr. S. sent Eustis, his secretary of legation, with her to present her. She had them in fact all at her feet.20

Louis-Napoleon was not only charming and sympathetic—taking the Confederate heroine’s hand and gently seating her on a cushion next to him—but he also surprised her with the depth of his knowledge about the war. “Tell the President,” she recorded him as saying, “that I have thoughts on his military plans—he has not concentrated enough. The Yankees have also made true blunders. If instead of throwing all your strength upon Vicksburg you could have left that to its fate and strengthened Lee so as to have taken Washington, the war would have ended.” He continued to be charming even when she asked him directly whether he would recognize the Confederate States. “I wish to God I could,” Louis-Napoleon answered. “But I cannot do it without England.”21 At the end of their conversation, the emperor escorted Rose to the door and shook her hand. He seemed to be offering hope, and for a short while she was elated by the interview. She wrote in such glowing terms to Georgiana Walker in Bermuda that her friend recorded in her diary:

Mrs. G. is much delighted with her visit to Paris, & considers her mission to have been a successful one. She had an audience of the Emperor, & was treated with marked attention. She says she advocated our cause warmly & earnestly, & left not one point uncovered; that the Emperor received her as one directly